The Most Important Thing

Photo by Olybrius 2008

I had a dream in which I was kidnapped and taken to a hotel room filled with boxes and boxes of what appeared to be old junk. My captor told me that in this room were the contents of his relative’s estate. He had brought me here to find the single most important thing, and to tell him what it is was when he returned. If I had the wrong answer, I would die.

Without another word, he enigmatically disappeared. My heart pounded like a caged bird as I frantically scratched through the cartons.

The gleam of an antique bracelet first caught my eye – well made, and no doubt of historic value, but what was it worth? Perhaps the deceased had herself inherited it from her mother or grandmother, to be treasured as a legacy and now passed on to my captor.

Next I spotted a paper so fragile that it nearly crumbled in my hand. The ink writing was long since faded and worn away at the folds, but it appeared to be a love letter penned by a Civil War soldier to his fiancée awaiting him at home. Did he return from battle alive, I wondered, and if so, was she still faithful? The story that letter could tell might speak volumes to my captor’s heritage.

I recoiled as my grasping hand encountered sharp, pointed teeth, rooted in a tiger’s jaw – possibly a safari trophy? I shuddered as I put this aside, knowing I would not want this reminder of man’s needless cruelty to animals. Yet, given my kidnapper’s criminal tendencies, this might be exactly what he sought.

Eureka – a map! An island, near the equator, showing coordinates and a pathway leading to an X near the center. A treasure map leading to gold doubloons, or just a hoax?

Even in my panicked state, a faint smile curled my lips as I noticed a plaster-of-paris mold of a tiny handprint, embellished with “I Love U” in a child’s scrawl. Could it be that the little hand commemorated the bond between my captor and his mother, reminding him of a gentler time, her nurturing love and the promises of youth?

Another memento of childhood – a painstakingly embroidered, now yellowing, christening dress. Perhaps the kidnapper counted on his infant sprinkling to get him to heaven?

Then a nicely framed diploma, summa cum laude Masters’ degree from Harvard. No doubt that had opened many doors for this family. Or was it the reverse – the heir spurning the advantages of an expensive college education, and instead squandering his inheritance?

Hiding in the corner of one of the last cartons was an inobtrusive plastic bottle containing heart medication. If only the deceased had taken this in time, she might still be here, and I would not be in this awful predicament!

Aha! I exclaimed aloud in my half delirious state -- surely this was it – a safe deposit box key!  Everything else here was just debris accumulating on the journey of life, with merely sentimental value or clues to the path taken. But the real reward was surely the cash, securities, title deeds, and other valuables locked away for the rightful heir.

Confident that I had found the most important thing, I suddenly realized that days had gone by, and I was ravenously hungry. There was no food in the room, but to my surprise, the door to the hallway was unlocked. I ran out, elated to be “free” but then spotted the armed guards at the hotel entrances and exits. Apparently I could roam about inside but not leave the hotel.

With an ominous thud, the door to my room locked shut behind me. If I were not inside the room, how could I save my life when my captor returned by telling him the most important thing?

But if I fainted from hunger, there was no hope at all. First find food, then somehow get back in the room. There were stores and restaurants, but I had no money, and I could tell from the faces of the staff that they were hardly sympathetic to my plight. I was thrilled to find a nearly empty box of crackers on a room service tray, with a few crumbs still inside. I snatched it up and scurried into a corridor leading to the pool room, thinking I could eat there in peace.

Instead I found a little girl in a soaking wet bathing suit, shivering and sobbing, and all alone. She threw her arms around me, crying “I’m cold! I’m hungry! I want my mommy!”

There were no towels or bathrobes anywhere, so I wrapped her in my sweater, hugged her, and gave her what was left of the crackers. I knew I had to stay with her to comfort her, even if I would be killed once apprehended. As starved, wretched and terrified as I felt, helping her gave me a strange sense of joy and peace, and I remembered Jesus’ words in Matthew 25:

35 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat… I was a stranger, and ye took me in…36 Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.…40 Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

Jesus! My Savior! How had I forgotten Him as the only One Who could rescue me? (Romans 10:9,13; Acts 2:21; 4:12 ) Only He would never leave me, nor forsake me (Hebrews 13:5).

As if the sun rose in my darkened mind, I suddenly knew that the most important thing in that hotel room was not the safe deposit box key, the jewelry, the diploma, the treasure map, the medicine, the childhood souvenirs, or the historic document. It was not part of the estate at all, but tucked invisibly in the nightstand drawer would surely be a Bible, left there by the Gideons in their mission to provide God’s Word to weary travelers on their journey through this planet that is not our true home (Psalm 119:19, Hebrews 11:13; 1 Peter 2:11).

I awoke feeling so thankful for God’s promises recorded in His Word (2 Samuel 7:28; Acts 2:33,39; 13:23). Without them, life would have no meaning. Why had I plunged into the futile exercise of combing through boxes full of trash without considering the treasure of Bible wisdom – the secret to abundant, eternal life (John 3:16; 10:10) for all who place their faith in Christ’s death, burial and resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:1-4)?

How often are we distracted by piles of junk accumulating in our life, while neglecting the riches found without fail in our Bible? Why do we worry about our “stuff” instead of storing treasures in Heaven, where we can enjoy them forever? (Luke 12:16-34; Matthew 6:19-21)

I felt blessed that my husband Richard recently became a Gideon, and that we had the privilege of handing Scriptures to students. I remembered a testimony shared at a Gideons’ meeting of a maid who was cleaning a hotel room and found a handwritten note carefully placed in the Gideons’ Bible to mark Psalm 23. The writer explained that he had checked in, feeling that his life was over and that to spare his family additional grief, he planned to kill himself. Then he started thumbing through that very Bible and read the verse that brought him newly found peace and hope:

Psalm 23:4 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

God alone can deliver us from all our fears and save us from all enemies, even sin, death and hell (Psalm 34:4-7; 2 Kings 17:39; Romans 8:2; 1 Corinthians 15:56-57). Truly the most important “thing” in this life is our Bible – God’s love letter to us that guides, comforts, corrects, and inspires us (Psalm 119:11,14.16, 105, etc.). But it is not a “thing” – just like Jesus, His Word is eternal and unchanging (2 Timothy 3:15-17; Matthew 24:35; Mark 13:31; Luke 21:33; Hebrews 13:8).

Without understanding its promise of eternal life through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Who reconciled sinful man to Holy God through His shed blood (Matthew 26:28; Hebrews 9:22), we cannot know the all-important One. Christ alone is the Way (John 14:6) to abundant, eternal life. Trust and follow Him today!

© 2014 Laurie Collett

Reposted from the archives

How God First Told Me to Read His Word

Photo by Nyehob 2016

Three weeks after I was saved by trusting Jesus Christ as my Savior, the One Who died to pay my sin debt and rose again to prove His deity (1 Corinthians 15:1-4), my husband and I had to meet a friend at the airport. Our friend’s plane had been delayed, so we found ourselves wandering through the shops when suddenly a book in a window display caught my eye.

“BIBLE CODE” read the large, black, Hebrew-stylized characters in the title on the cover, with what appeared to be word-search puzzles underneath. Intrigued, I entered the store and began thumbing through a copy of Michael Drosnin’s nonfiction best seller. A casual perusal soon became a voracious desire to read the book cover to cover, so I bought a copy and spent the remaining hours until our friend arrived devouring its contents.

At risk of oversimplifying a highly complex topic, let me explain that the book referenced a paper published in the academically prestigious journal Statistical Science. This article described “Equidistant Letter Sequences,” or ELS, in the Hebrew Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament. These ELS encoded words, names and dates near each other, in meaningful groupings with historical and possibly prophetic significance.

To use an arbitrary number, circling every fifth, or fiftieth, or many other skip sequences of Hebrew characters in the original text of the Torah often resulted in a meaningful message, presaging events occurring millennia after God inscribed His Word on stone tablets and delivered it to Moses.

In 1985, this type of ELS analysis searching for names of 34 Jewish rabbis who were well-known over the past 1,000 years found all 34 in the book of Genesis, coded along with the dates of their births or deaths, even though Genesis was written more than 1,000 years before the first rabbi was even born!. The statistical probability of this happening by chance alone was determined to be 11 million to 1, as indicated by the authors of the Statistical Science article. The journal’s editors not only could find no fault with the analysis, methods or calculations, but even issued a challenge to other scientists to do so.

The existence of such codes was suspected by Sir Isaac Newton and confirmed in a very basic ELS by a Czechoslovakian rabbi in 1938. But it was not until the advent of modern computers that such searches became practical.

As the Book of Daniel predicted, in the End Times in which we now live, knowledge shall increase (Daniel 12:4) and the ability of computers to calculate and comb through data extremely quickly has put a whole world of knowledge in the palm of anyone’s hand who owns a smart phone. In that verse, the Hebrew word translated “many shall run to and fro,” is actually the same as the word now used in modern Hebrew to mean “computer search.”

Recent events coded in ELS in the Torah include the Oklahoma City bombing, the Gulf War, the 9/11 Twin Towers strike, the Holocaust, Watergate, and the Apollo 11 space mission. In 1994, ELS analysis revealed a message indicating that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin would be assassinated. He did not believe the warning Drosnin gave him, but the “predicted” event actually came to pass 14 months later.

Unfortunately, the original science became diluted and popularized to more of a parlor trick, as searchers looked for ELS in English and other Bible translations and unsuccessfully attempted to predict the future using them. Several predictions based on Drosnin’s searches thankfully failed to materialize, including atomic world war in 2000 or 2006.

On the night that I began reading about the Bible Code, I only had a very cursory understanding of all this, but one thing seemed very clear: the Bible must have been written by supernatural inspiration from God Himself (2 Timothy 3:16). Before being saved, I had previously considered the Bible to be fine literature and had heard and read several passages in school and college, but I had never grasped (1 Corinthians 1:18, 21) their eternal significance (Matthew 24:35) and Divine wisdom (Proverbs 1:2; 4:5; Colossians 3:16).

The morning after I sat up all night reading the Bible Code, I attempted to summarize what I had learned to our son Brendan, who was then 10 years old, over breakfast. After my breathless explanation, I asked him, “So do you think it’s true?”

Brendan rolled his eyes. “Well, of course the Bible is true, Mom – God wrote it.”

Out of the mouth of babes! (Matthew 21:16). In his childlike faith (Mark 10:14; Matthew 18:3), Brendan clearly saw and spoke the truth God was speaking to my heart – that all Scripture is divinely inspired. As I later learned, all Scripture is profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16).

God speaks to His children in different ways tailored to their personality and intellectual preferences. Given my background as a physician and research scientist in biochemistry and molecular biology, perhaps He first drew me to His Word by these “coincidences” that resulted in my learning of the Bible Code.

Yet we don’t need science or a computer to understand God’s Word or to know it is true – all we need is faith (Hebrews 11:1), which is possible only through the Holy Spirit Who lives within us and instructs us from the moment we are saved (2 Corinthians 1:22; Ephesians 1:13; 4:30). God spoke to me the second time through the words of my son that His Word is true, for He wrote it.

Later I learned that faith comes by hearing (or reading) the Word of God (Romans 10:17), which was the third message God gave me about the importance of reading and studying all the Bible. Three days after the above events, Richard took out the trash at my medical practice.

He returned with a strange look on his face. “You’ll never guess what I just found sitting on top of the dumpster cover,” he said, handing me a Bible, which was in excellent condition despite its age.

You can imagine my surprise when I realized that this Bible was printed in the year I was born; that the front page was inscribed with the “Serenity Prayer” that I used to carry in my purse as a good luck charm in high school; and that key passages had been highlighted!

“I get it, Lord,” I prayed. “You want me to read this, cover to cover, to get to know You better and to understand Your will for my life. Thank You for sending it to me!”

So I read it through completely, from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22, not understanding many passages and having many questions. Then I found a reading plan that completes the Old Testament once and the New Testament twice during one year, which worked out well because there were three passages to read each day, and there were three of us at breakfast so we could each read one.

Brendan is out of the house and married now, but praise God, He has empowered my husband and me to complete the 1-year reading plan every year since we got saved in 2000! The Bible truly is a living book, with new insight to be gained with each reading, through the direction of the Holy Spirit Who is eager to teach us (1 Corinthians 2:13) if we are eager to learn!

We wouldn’t imagine going a whole week without eating and then trying to make up for it with one big meal, yet many Christians let their Bible collect dust all week, opening it only for the Sunday morning sermon. Praise God that He will speak to us daily through His Word (Luke 11:3), if we are faithful to listen!

© 2018 Laurie Collett